“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(As we waited for tonight’s session to begin I read to Jane a letter I’ve just written to a prominent biologist. I’m asking his help in obtaining source material for the visual “evidence” for evolution — showing the forms involved, say, as little by little the descendants of the reptile changed into the bird. By evidence in this case I mean drawings, based upon the best scientific assumptions as to what all of those intermediate creatures must have looked like. I also wanted estimates as to how they survived for so many millennia while the changes took place. As far as I’ve been able to learn, no such transitional fossils have been found, like the discrete forms of reptiles and birds that have been discovered, so I decided to search out the next best thing: the visual representations as to what they must have looked like. But what good were the developing stages of a wing, I wondered, and how many uncounted generations of reptiles-turning-into-birds had to carry those appendages, before a fully-formed bird was finally hatched that could fly? Would nature do things that way?

Dictation: It may seem to some readers that the subject matter of this book (pause) is far divorced from any discussion of the specific development of psychic abilities.

Many people write requesting that I outline the proper methods for achieving astral projection, for example, or psychic advancement, or spiritual understanding. In its fashion, however, this book is geared to bring about the development of such abilities, for it is not a lack of methods that inhibits such activities. Instead, “psychic progress” is hampered by those very negative beliefs that we have tried to bring to your attention.

Some correspondents write: “I realize that I am too egotistical.” There are many schools for spiritual advancement that teach you to “get rid of the clutter of your impulses and desires,” to shove aside the self that you are in search of a greater idealized version. First of all, the self that you are is ever-changing and never static. There is an inner self in the terms of those definitions, but that inner self, which is the source of your present being, speaks through your impulses. They provide in-built spiritual and biological impetuses toward your most ideal development (underlined). You must trust the self that you are, now.

Some people are only aware of — or largely aware of — impulses toward anger, because they have inhibited those natural impulses toward love that would otherwise temper what seemed to be aggressive desires. When you begin trusting yourselves, you start by taking it for granted that to some extent at least you have not trusted yourself or your impulses in the past: You have thought that impulses were dangerous, disruptive, or even evil. So as you begin to learn self-trust, you acknowledge your impulses. You try them on for size. You see where they lead you by allowing them some freedom. You do not follow urges through that would hurt others physically, or that seem in direct contradiction to your present beliefs — but you do acknowledge them. You do try to discover their source. Behind them you will almost always find an inhibited impulse — or many of them — that motivated you to move in some ideal direction, to seek a love or understanding so idealized in your mind that it seemed impossible to achieve. You are left with the impulse to strike out.

This sense of division within the self forces you to think that there is a remote, spiritual, wise, intuitive inner self, and a bewildered, put-upon, spiritually ignorant, inferior physical self, which happens to be the one you identify with. Many of you believe, moreover, that the physical self’s very nature is evil, that its impulses, left alone, will run in direct opposition to the good of the physical world and society, and fly in the face of the deeper spiritual truths of inner reality. The inner self then becomes so idealized and so remote that by contrast the physical self seems only the more ignorant and flawed. In the face of such beliefs the ideal of psychic development, or astral travel, or spiritual knowledge, or even of sane living, seems so remote as to be impossible. You must, therefore, begin to celebrate your own beings, to look to your own impulses as being the natural connectors between the physical and the nonphysical self. Children trusting their impulses learn to walk, and trusting your impulses, you can find yourselves again.

To that extent, the Bible’s interpretation is correct. Life was given, was free to develop according to its characteristic conditions. The planet was prepared, and endowed with life. Consciousness built the forms, so life existed within consciousness for all eternity. There was no point in which chemicals or atoms suddenly acquired life, for they always possessed consciousness, which is life’s requirement.

(Pause at 10:07.) I understand that it appears that species have vanished, but again you must remember probabilities, and that those species simply “developed” along the patterns of probable earths. You are not just dealing with a one-line development of matter, but of an unimaginable creativity, in which all versions of your physical world exist, each one quite convinced of its physical nature. There are ramifications quite unspeakable, although in certain states of trance, or with the aid of educated dreaming, you might be able to glimpse the inner complications, the webworks of communications that connect your official earth with other probable ones. You choose your time and focus in physical reality again and again, and the mind holds an inner comprehension of many seemingly mysterious developments involving the species.